


fight or flight

by briony46



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Temporary Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves Can Levitate, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, No Incest, Protective Klaus Hargreeves, Protective Number Five | The Boy, Sibling Bonding, Suicidal Thoughts, but no on-page violence about how they actually died, but they're trying their best, family is hard when you've been apart longer than you've been together, five learning how to be a good sibling, get some help, how they got there is up to you, klaus has a very unique relationship with death which is explored pretty heavily, klaus learning how to be a good sibling, klaus sees some ghosts which are relatively gory in description, set sometime after the apocalypse was averted, stop it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:05:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27350143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briony46/pseuds/briony46
Summary: Klaus had always known he was going to die. Expected it, even. (The screams of the dead ringing in his ears before he could walk or talk had that effect.) But he'd always figured he would go out lying in a dingy alleyway somewhere, too high to remember his own name, or that he'd run his mouth too much and his body would be found in a dumpster four days later. Going out in a blaze of glory was never on his list and, as it was, this was a pretty fucking pathetic blaze. Barely an ember.Either way, it should happen any second now, because Klaus wasstillfalling.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Everyone, Klaus Hargreeves & Luther Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz (mentioned literally one time), Number Five | The Boy & Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 18
Kudos: 193





	fight or flight

**Author's Note:**

> me walking in after 3 years of radio silence with 12k words of an entirely new fandom and a smoothie: sup
> 
> please be mindful of the tags!

Klaus was never a superhero.

He'd grown up in a house full of them on account of being bought as a baby by an eccentric billionaire, and he'd been part of said eccentric billionaire's impressively extensive marketing scheme for PR reasons — the Umbrella Academy brand would have fallen apart without his handsome mug on the merchandise, if he did say so himself — but he'd never been big on feats of heroism. It wasn't his style.

If selflessness was a cousin of heroism, then he got close. Sometimes. On occasion. Specifically on the occasions where his siblings got themselves into trouble and Klaus, like the good brother he is, decided to help bail them out of it. See? Selfless!

All of this to say: Klaus is presently bored out of his mind. 'Tis the fate of the lookout.

Okay, he wasn't _technically_ the lookout anymore, but what else was he supposed to do? Count the bricks? No thanks.

Klaus was the Ben Summoner now. Promotion! Except, no, because it was the _same thing_. Aside from the cool glowy hands that came with being the Ben Summoner, it was _exactly the same_. Stay out of the way, shut up, don't get killed. Klaus was _bored_ and being the lookout was simply more interesting. So, here he was. Looking out.

In retrospect, maybe telling the guy whose powers required him to light up like a Christmas tree to hide in a both literally and figuratively shady alley, wasn't the best call. But no one had bothered him yet so what the hell did he know? Mere feet away his siblings were beating on a bunch of no-do-gooders in broad daylight and wreaking havoc on a commercial street in the process.

Fucking whatever. At least it was entertaining.

Now, here's the thing: because Klaus was never a superhero he was never as freakishly athletic as some of his siblings. Even the non-Luther ones. While they spent their childhoods kicking ass and taking names, Klaus' childhood (and adulthood) were spent in unsavoury places with unsavoury people who took money he didn't have in exchange for getting the unsavoury corpses harassing him day and night to _shut the fuck up_.

So while Klaus' siblings were good at things like spatio-temporal physics, throwing knives good, and blowing up moons, Klaus was good at spotting pickpockets. Hell, he was one.

Imagine his surprise when his smallest, most murderous brother got mugged right out in the open and didn't even notice. Five must have skipped the 'don't let people steal your shit' part of survival training. Which was understandable, since he was literally the only person alive on the planet for a depressing amount of time, but still. A rookie mistake.

Klaus had zoned out through most of their family meetings since the Apocalypse had been averted and Five's long, rambling rants about how intellectually inferior they all were compared to him had barely registered as background noise. But he couldn't _not_ notice how totally neurotic Five had been in the days he'd scrambled to get his hands on it.

Klaus didn't know what _it_ was or what it did. (If it did anything. Maybe Five had filled Klaus' recently vacated position as the family magpie and taken up a sudden interest in useless pieces of junk.) He knew that it was small and grey and shiny and vaguely rectangular and it could be Five's rebound from his mannequin ex for all Five told him about his personal life. He knew that it had been stolen, and he didn't need to know much more than that. He was just the lookout.

There's one problem with the decades long decision that this be the case: Klaus didn't have magical communication powers. He couldn't manipulate space to appear wherever he wanted and discreetly warn his siblings when the danger that he had been oh so diligently looking out for showed up. Most of his family didn't even own a phone. Himself included. This, usually, left him with one option.

"Five!" Klaus yelled at the top of his lungs. Five didn't so much as glance his way.

The thief disappeared into a building. Exit stage right, pursued by no one.

" _Five!_ " Klaus yelled again. He waved his arms around for good measure.

Five's head snapped in his direction. Klaus perked up, gesturing wildly. Five disappeared in a haze of blue.

Klaus whirled around to find Five knocking a masked goon out with their own gun and didn't even blink.

"Hey! Fancy meeting you here!"

Five threw the gun aside. "What the hell are you doing? You were supposed to stay in the alley."

"Yes, by the dumpster, I remember," Klaus said soberly. Five glared at him. "Listen, Five—"

"Be more careful, Klaus," Five said shortly.

"Wait—"

Too late. The little bastard was gone. Shit. Klaus couldn't see him anywhere.

And even if he could, there was no time. The first few seconds after a lift were crucial and Five's pickpocket had disappeared several of those ago. Klaus cast his eyes around the street but all his other siblings were in similar positions than Five had been in, which meant all 'get out of the way Klaus's and zero cooperation in dragging them off on a side mission. More wasted time and effort.

He slipped into the building alone. He wasn't sure what to expect; a trap? An instant sneak attack? There could be a school of sharks swimming in a pit of lava in there for all he knew. Instead, it was:

Fucking.

Stairs.

Who would've guessed?

Klaus distantly remembered the training sessions where he and his siblings would race each other up that dizzying spiral staircase. He felt a prickle of irritation that his father had been proven right about something, even something as predictable as 'you may have to run up some stairs one day'. Why was the old man considered a genius again?

The sound of footsteps rang through the empty stairwell. They were fading upwards, a floor or two above him at the moment. Klaus followed silently on bare feet.

(He'd lost his shoes somewhere. He wasn't entirely sure how. Ben would give him grief for it later.)

The strain of putting more distance than was ideal between himself and a corporeal Ben was making itself known. It stole the breath from his lungs like a string pulled taut against his chest and made his head throb distractingly. But he kept it up, kept his hands engulfed in that pale blue mist, because while he couldn't help his siblings much in the powers department, Ben could. Klaus could do this much for them.

Klaus tailed the thief up, up, up. When she slipped out of the final exit in the building, the roof access, a sinking feeling settled in his gut. He followed anyway.

She was waiting for him. Her arms were crossed and her foot tapped against the gravel of the roof impatiently.

"This is what you do, then," she said conversationally, tipping her head in appraisal. "The Séance; stopping petty theft."

Klaus shrugged loosely and pulled on an easy-going grin. "I'm all for petty theft," he said. "More power to you. There's just this one little issue though."

She stared him down blankly, disinterest written all over her face. "And what's that?"

"Oh! Well, since you asked," Klaus beamed, pushing all his nervous energy into the dramatics act. "You just so happened to rob my little tyke of a brother. And I get it, really! It's tempting, but…" He clicked his tongue as if scolding a child. "That's a big no-no."

The woman smiled. "He started it," she said childishly, all bared teeth and aggression. Klaus wondered who Five had killed to put this one on the warpath before he quickly dismissed the thought. It didn't matter. _Irrelevant_ , Five would say.

"Yeah, he does that a lot," Klaus agreed casually. "Kids, right? You've got to be the bigger person is all. Which is easy 'cause the dude's a little hurricane of five foot nothin'."

"You talk too much."

"Thank you."

The woman lunged. Klaus shot sideways with a yelp, away from the roof access, very much wanting to never experience that little mishap of his mother's heels and an unforgiving brush with gravity ever again. No lunging ladies near the stairs, please and thank you. His heart hammered distractingly in his chest as he danced around her like the annoying little gnat he was, all speed and evasion.

A particularly well placed elbow caught him in the rib. He stumbled back several paces and gasped sharply.

Klaus wouldn't win this fight. He was wheezing and winded, and his focus was split between his opponent and keeping his power steady. The woman, in contrast, was cool and collected, and Klaus could barely keep up with dodging her blows.

 _Play to your strengths, Number Four_ , Reginald's voice chided in his head.

A ghost screamed.

Klaus almost laughed.

His power had never been a strength before. Klaus had always leaned more towards 'colossal pain in the ass' territory when classifying it. How times change.

After taking a moment to steel himself, Klaus acknowledged the ghosts on the rooftop with small glances.

The woman was swamped by the dead; people of all races, ages, genders, nationalities. She didn't discriminate. The causes of death varied too. Some sported bullet holes to the head, their brains splattered in their hair and their faces grossly disfigured. Others had blood pouring from their slit throats, indecipherable gargled curses lost with the severed vocal chords. Heads hanging unnaturally from necks, missing limbs, skin boiled off, it just. Kept. Going.

Most striking, though, was that they were completely ignoring him. Most ghosts started screaming their heads off as soon as they realised he could see them; they demanded that he avenge their deaths, or track down their parent-partner-child to tell them such and such, and flew into a rage when he ignored them. They screamed at him, accused him of being the one that had killed them, told him that it was unfair that he got to live while they had to die.

Klaus was of the opinion that it was unfair that they got to die while he had to live, but. Semantics. 

A few jumpers hung around the edges of his vision, mournfully haunting their place of death. They cracked and fractured in all the wrong places, bone sticking out of translucent skin like fissures in rock. Many were forced to drag themselves along as their legs had shattered on impact. They would turn bitter and resentful if Klaus hung around long enough.

But those haunting the woman barely spared him a glance. He swallowed down his nausea as he scanned through the crowd intermittently, his mind whirling. They were incredibly pissed, screaming bloody murder, and must have died even more horrible deaths than the average tortured souls Klaus encountered daily to ignore him entirely.

His eyes caught on a particular ghost. A young girl, maybe sixteen years old, whose face had been almost entirely burned off. Her left eye leaked sluggishly out of her skull. She was silent, simply glaring at her killer, and Klaus knew it was from choice because tongueless ghosts bled all over the place. As if sensing his gaze, she turned to face him, and her intact eye widened fractionally when she realised he was looking right at her.

 _"She'll kill you,"_ Burned Alive Girl told him after a moment. _"Even if she doesn't have to. She enjoys it."_

Klaus gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment. This woman, whoever she was, was deadly. He could tell that much from how she fought like she wanted to rip him in half, if not from the hate group of her victims who had devoted themselves to following her around and screaming unheard profanities at her for all of time. Dozens of ghosts had attached themselves to her — none as lucid and coherent as Burned Alive Girl, maybe, but all seething. All eternally pissed.

Klaus knew first-hand that it didn't matter if you were an experienced killer or a shaking, sobbing child locked away in a crypt; fighting back against ghosts was impossible. The dead cannot be killed.

Then Klaus remembered something that sent a chill down his spine, deeper than even the dead had ever managed. His eyes flitted among the crowd of screaming, raging ghosts, growing steadily wider in realisation.

She was after Five.

Klaus clenched his hands into fists where they had gone lax at his sides. He stretched his power further, tugged on the veil between plains surrounding his more immediate ghosts experimentally, tested the strain on his abilities. He could handle it. He _pulled_ , began to bring down the barrier and coax the spirits into visibility and corporeality, into light and warmth and life. (He imagined it felt more like rage and hate and vengeance to them, but if their last living moments were filled with unimaginable anger Klaus wasn't going to begrudge them it.)

Just as the aura surrounding his hands began to pulse a deep midnight blue, and a foreign, harsh chill slithered its way into his chest, the woman moved. Klaus didn't have time to react before his back was slammed into the wall of the roof access. His head bounced painfully off the brick and his vision swam. His powers slipped.

She snarled something he couldn't make out beyond the ringing in his ears and the raucous, anticipatory shouts of the ghosts. Klaus imagined it was something along the lines of "don't do that again _or else_ ," or something equally as villainous and overdone. Bad guys these days had no originality.

Klaus' gaze drifted as he tried to blink away the film of fuzzy black static which had encroached on his vision. Burned Alive Girl hovered nearby. Her sharp gaze flared with something like _pity frustration anger_ as it flickered between Klaus and the woman, that familiar burning desire to _do something_ that Klaus had seen so often on Ben's face written all over hers.

She was too young to be so angry.

She was too young to be so dead.

Klaus thought of Ben, staring down his own memorial statue while his body lay in a casket mere feet away. Klaus thought of Five, hanging over the mantle as a warning while he survived an apocalyptic hellscape decades in the future.

Klaus had tried to summon him after his disappearance. He had been both disappointed and relieved when little Number Five hadn't appeared in his bedroom to babble about the intersectionalities of time travel and ghost physics, or to rage and rant and somehow blame Klaus for his untimely demise in that way that had always made Klaus feel like a complete idiot.

Five couldn't be that. Five couldn't be invisible and inefficient, frustrated beyond belief that he couldn't help himself or anyone else. Five couldn't turn into one of the angry, bitter, raging creatures that haunted Klaus' nightmares.

With a final push, Klaus _pulled_ the veil down. His hands flared with blinding light.

The ghosts pounced on their prey instantly. The woman was ripped away and Klaus collapsed to the ground. He gasped in shaking breaths against the power running through him, his veins lit up neon blue against his skin. He felt all of the ghosts — their hunger, their hatred, their furious vitriol — they consumed him, enveloped him, swallowed him whole. He couldn't see beyond them. Breath rattled in his lungs unnaturally. He was too dead, too undead, to breathe. How could he breathe?

Perhaps he had made them like this. As their raging hatred leaked into him, made him flinch away from sudden screams in the dead of night, maybe he affected them equally. His fear of his powers, his fear for his family, had bled into their dry veins and filled them with the strength of desperation. He was the maker of his own worst nightmares. He walked in death and shaped it with his every breath.

A ghostly limb jostled him and he gasped, shrinking away instinctively. He wasn't in the mausoleum. He wasn't. The ghosts wouldn't be ignoring him if he was. But they were still too close, packed tightly against him, and his back was to the wall. Klaus was trapped.

No, that wasn't right. Not in the mausoleum. Not trapped.

His eyes found his shaking hands. He was aglow with power.

Not trapped.

With a grunt, he began to army crawl his way out.

Any semblance of sanity that the ghosts had once possessed was long gone. He was crawling through a pack of wild dogs and hoping that they didn't decide he looked like dinner. Sharp, claw-like nails caught him on the shoulder and he hissed as blood bubbled up.

His eardrums felt like they would burst with the amount of pure _noise_ there was. He could barely hear himself think. It was deafening and inescapable; the constant background noise that accompanied him everywhere dialled up to eleven as the ghosts' dying wish was finally granted.

Bruises formed as he was jostled around. An ant among elephants. He crawled on the floor, scrambling along desperately, just trying to see an _end_ to the seemingly endless horde of vengeful corpses.

Maybe there wasn't an end; the dead outnumbered the living so drastically that there was no point putting a figure to it. He could be trapped here forever, three more miserable little hours which stretched into eternity while he wasted away trying to find an out. Living among the dead and dying among the living. Which was he?

He was startled out of his thoughts by a hand on the back of his neck.

Klaus jerked, thoughts of the ghosts turning on him and getting their long promised revenge flooding his mind. The hand shifted and Klaus' shirt cut into his windpipe, cutting off anything he might have done or said as he choked on non-existent air.

He was dragged, stumbling to get his feet under him but too uncoordinated, too clumsy, too busy trying to _breathe_. It was a living person dragging him, he realised somewhere in his foggy brain, not the ghosts. He couldn't remember why that wasn't better right now.

She fended them off, still hanging around and screaming bloody murder in the wake of his panic.

And then—

He was falling.

See, Klaus had always known he was going to die. Expected it, even. (The screams of the dead ringing in his ears before he could walk or talk had that effect.) But he'd always figured he would go out lying in a dingy alleyway somewhere, too high to remember his own name, or that he'd run his mouth too much and his body would be found in a dumpster four days later. Going out in a blaze of glory was never on his list and, as it was, this was a pretty fucking pathetic blaze. Barely an ember.

 _Klaus Hargreeves_ , his tombstone would read, _1989-2019. He survived being a member of the Umbrella Academy, living on the streets, the Vietnam War, and the literal Apocalypse. He then tragically got turned into a Klaus pancake_ — Klauscake! — _for trying to play the hero_.

This wouldn't be Klaus' first death. He'd walked away from an incident of fatal head trauma with only a mild headache — following a pleasant interaction with one little girl on a bike and a conversation with The Worst Father in the World — and that wasn't even mentioning the suspicious amount of overdoses he'd miraculously survived one way or another. But knitting a few brain cells back together or restarting his heart didn't seem equal to scraping him off the sidewalk and piecing every bone in his body back into place like some messed up jigsaw puzzle.

Scratch that: it _wasn't_ equal. It was a whole 'nother ballpark.

Maybe she couldn't send him back from this one and she'd finally let him stay. Maybe he would see Dave again.

Or maybe she would send him back even if she couldn't do it properly. Maybe she'd leave him crippled to make sure he couldn't lift a finger to bug her any further.

Either way, it should happen any second now, because Klaus was _still_ falling.

Klaus peeled an eye open cautiously — and blinked.

And blinked again.

The street had stopped.

No. _He_ had stopped.

Although the street had stopped too, he supposed, because there were bodies littered across it and not a single fight in sight.

If Klaus didn't know better (he didn't), he would say that he was hanging out ten feet in the air.

He sucked in a sharp breath and released it in a hysterical huff of laughter. Questions niggled at the back of his head, questions of why and how and who, but Klaus didn't care for answers right now. He wasn't a stain on the sidewalk and that was good enough for him.

"Klaus!"

Klaus jolted and dropped an inch. His stomach flipped. He stilled, hardly daring to breathe as panic and adrenaline overwhelmed his nervous system. When nothing drastic happened, and the ground didn't rush up to meet him, he sighed in relief.

Distantly, he recognised Diego. His temple was painted red and he gaped up at Klaus, his mouth working wordlessly.

Well. This was awkward.

"Hey bro," Klaus called. His voice was almost normal if not for the slightest tinge of hysteria to it.

"Klaus," Diego said again, loud enough to be heard but not the full on yell that had almost knocked Klaus out of the sky in his surprise. "What the hell."

 _"Seconded,"_ Ben said, sidling up next to Diego.

The others soon followed in various states of urgency — Ben grimaced when Allison's elbow phased through him but she didn't seem to notice — which turned into various states of shock as their eyes turned on him.

"Are you _levitating?_ " Five demanded, and Klaus giggled. Levitating. That was such a Five way to say flying.

"What, this?" Klaus asked nonchalantly, as if his heart wasn't trying to jackhammer its way out of his chest. "I don't know if you guys have heard, but I'm _super_ high."

No one laughed except Klaus. If he didn't laugh he thought he might cry and he knew that wouldn't help the situation.

 _"Weak effort,"_ Ben offered with a small smile. His voice was tinged with the same panic and fear that had settled at the pit of Klaus' stomach, but the familiar teasing settled his nerves slightly.

"Excuse me if I'm not at the top of my game right now, _Ben_ ," Klaus retorted.

Five ignored Klaus' brilliant puns, because he had no sense of humour, and turned to Vanya. "Can you get him down?"

Vanya floundered. Her eyes flitted between Five and Klaus anxiously. "I — I can try." 

Her words didn't fill Klaus with confidence. He trusted Vanya, of course he did, but she hadn't gotten a great handle on her powers yet for fear of killing the world again. He didn't want the both of them tumbling towards a month in the hospital.

Klaus thought it was a better idea for Five to teleport up here, grab him and take them both to ground level again. He opened his mouth to say so—

When gravity reclaimed its hold on him.

He yelped. His siblings panicked. The ground rushed to meet him and he squeezed his eyes shut, braced himself to grace the ground with his face—

He crashed into a remarkably squishy something which let out on 'oof'.

Klaus stayed very still for a long moment, afraid that if he moved an inch the illusion would shatter and he would be dead again. Or worse: not.

He dared to suck in a shaky breath of oxygen.

He was still in one piece.

He exhaled.

He was still alive.

Another one in, just to be sure.

His next breath came out as a hysterical laugh. "I'm not a Klauscake!"

His siblings were talking, panicked garbles of words which refused to penetrate the fog of Klaus' brain. He let them buzz around him meaninglessly, too busy drowning in the aftershocks of adrenaline that rushed through his body to decipher them.

He leaned away from the things which had broken his fall — oh, arms. Those were arms — and came face to face with Luther. Klaus grinned brightly. "Thanks, Luther."

"You're welcome," Luther said breathlessly. Then his eyebrows furrowed. "Wait, what's a—"

"What was that?" Allison asked. Her voice shook. "What _was_ that, Klaus?"

Luther gingerly set Klaus on his feet, which adamantly refused to hold his weight. Klaus swore and toppled forwards but Diego caught him with an arm around the waist and barked at Luther to be more careful; Klaus leaned into the support gratefully. He felt like a noodle on limbs. Limbs like noodles? God, thinking was hard all of a sudden.

"Wish I knew," Klaus muttered. His head hurt. "How'd you guys know?"

"Ben disappeared," Diego told him gently. "What happened, bro? You look like hell."

"And you're charming as ever, brother dear," Klaus replied, patting the side of Diego's face fondly. He looked completely baffled at the interaction and Klaus heard Ben snicker behind him.

 _"Where are your_ shoes _?"_ Ben said suddenly. He sounded so affronted that Klaus burst out laughing.

"I lost them," Klaus gasped amidst giggles. "I lost my shoes, Benny, and I knew you'd hate it. I don't know where they are. I'm shoeless!"

"Klaus," Diego called. He was probably aiming for stern but landed somewhere around fond exasperation. Klaus blinked at him.

"Yes?"

"What happened?" Diego repeated patiently.

"Oh." Klaus blinked. "Um."

 _"Are you okay?"_ Ben asked, and when Klaus looked at him that worried little wrinkle had appeared between his eyebrows. _"You seem kind of out of it."_

"I'm fine," Klaus said. He lifted a hand to the back of his head absentmindedly and winced when his fingers brushed over damp curls. Five honed in on the movement like a hawk.

"You hit your head." He dragged his hand down to shortstack level and Klaus was surprised to see blood staining his fingertips.

"No. Well," Klaus backtracked immediately when Five glared at him. His thoughts were hard to keep track of. He might be concussed. "Maybe. A little bit. It wasn't my fault."

 _"That's a first,"_ Ben joked. Or not. Didn't matter.

"Sit," Five ordered, already manhandling Klaus forwards.

"What, here?" Klaus looked around the ruined street in bewilderment. "What about avoiding clean-up crews and all that crap?"

"Fuck clean-up crews," Five said as he and Diego pushed Klaus to sit on the side of the road. Klaus raised an eyebrow, again looking pointedly around the wreck that had once been a commercial street. No way would this place stay empty for long.

"I'll rumour anyone who comes," Allison volunteered. The confident set to her shoulders and the no-nonsense timbre of her voice brooked no argument.

"Okay, that's great and all," Klaus replied, batting away Five's hands as his little-older brother tried to grab at his skull. "But why does that mean I can't go back to bed?"

"Because I said so."

Klaus groaned. "Jeez, Five, you're such an old man."

"And you're such a child," Five snapped impatiently.

"Klaus." Vanya interrupted their bickering, crouching down to Klaus' level and turning those big brown eyes on him. "We just want to make sure you're okay."

Well that just wasn't fair. He couldn't say no to Vanya.

 _"She's right,"_ Ben said. He was hovering over Five's shoulder and looking entirely too amused with Klaus' predicament.

Klaus sighed deeply. "Fine," he conceded. "Do your mother-henning."

And he thought Ben was bad.

Five inspected his head gently, running his fingers over the curve of his skull in search of bumps. When he prodded at the tender area that Klaus' fingers had come away from wet and slick with blood Klaus' vision went spotty.

"Sorry," Five muttered. He leaned back on his heels and his mouth curled into a dissatisfied line.

"What's the verdict, doc," Klaus prompted with a goofy grin. It was never pleasant to be on the receiving end of one of Five's stares. The kid was creepy even when he wasn't plotting someone's murder. "How long have I got?"

Five didn't even blink. Super creepy. "Whose fault was it?"

Klaus frowned. "Pardon?"

"You said that hitting your head wasn't your fault." Klaus' stomach sank. "Whose was it?"

Klaus scoffed. "You pick now to start taking me at my word."

Five's eyes narrowed.

"I've got a head injury, Fivey. I was probably talking nonsense."

No one took the opportunity to say that he always talked nonsense. Klaus bit back a sigh.

"Can we go home now?"

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think! i live off of comments and kudos. come scream at me on [tumblr](https://acevampyre.tumblr.com) if you'd like


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